NASA plans Galileo's birthday celebration
WASHINGTON, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- The U.S. space agency is planning a special exhibit to celebrate Galileo's 445th birthday and 2009's designation as the International Year of Astronomy.
In conjunction with Galileo's birthday next Sunday, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration is releasing images from its Great Observatories -- the Hubble and Spitzer space telescopes and the Chandra X-ray Observatory -- to more than 100 U.S. planetariums, museums, nature centers and schools.
"The selected sites will unveil a large 9-square-foot print of the spiral galaxy Messier 101 that combines the optical view of Hubble, the infrared view of Spitzer and the X-ray view of Chandra into one multi-wavelength picture," NASA said. Each image presents a different wavelength view of that galaxy, illustrating how far astronomy has come since Galileo first turned his telescope to the sky in 1609.
"It's like using your eyes, night vision goggles and X-ray vision all at the same time," said Hashima Hasan, NASA's lead scientist for the International Year of Astronomy.
Messier 101 is a spiral galaxy about 22 million light-years from Earth in the constellation Ursa Major.
The Feb. 14-28 unveilings will occur at 76 museums and 40 U.S. schools and universities. A list of the exhibits is available at http://hubblesource.stsci.edu/events/iya/participants.php.
Immunosuppressant may aid dry eye disorder
PHILADELPHIA, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- U.S. medical scientists say they've discovered a topical eye emulsion might become a cost-effective treatment for dry eye syndrome.
Dr. Melissa Brown of the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine said the emulsion consisting of cyclosporine -- a medication used to reduce transplant rejections or to treat arthritis and psoriasis -- could be used when the condition doesn't respond to other therapies.
"Patients with dry eye syndrome have more difficulty reading, carrying out professional work, using a computer, watching television and driving compared with those without dry eyes," said Brown, who is also associated with the Center for Value-Based Medicine, which partially funded the research. "The burden of dry eye disease from both the prevalence and patient morbidity standpoints makes this a sizable public health dilemma."
The researchers in their meta study assessed the comparative effectiveness and cost-effectiveness of eye drops containing a 0.05 percent emulsion of cyclosporine for patients whose moderate to severe dry eye syndrome didn't respond to conventional therapy.
When compared with eye drops containing only lubricant, the cyclosporine drops were associated with a 4.3 percent improvement in quality of life and conferred a 7.1 percent improvement over no treatment, the scientists said.
The study is detailed in the journal Archives of Ophthalmology.
Scientists hike carbon nanotube capacity
CHAMPAIGN, Ill., Feb. 10 (UPI) -- U.S. scientists say they've been able to increase the current-carrying capacity of carbon nanotubes to a level previously thought impossible to achieve.
University of Illinois researchers said they used an avalanche process that carries more electrons down more paths, similar to the way a multilane highway carries more traffic than a one-lane road.
"Single-wall carbon nanotubes are already known to carry current densities up to 100 times higher than the best metals like copper," said Professor Eric Pop. "We now show that semiconducting nanotubes can carry nearly twice as much current as previously thought."
The scientists said they discovered high electric fields of 10 volts per micron energetic electrons and holes can create additional electron-hole pairs, leading to the avalanche effect in which free carriers multiply and the current rapidly increases until the nanotube breaks down.
The sharp increase in current, Pop said, is due to the onset of avalanche impact ionization -- a phenomenon observed in certain semiconductor diodes and transistors at high electric fields, but not previously seen in nanotubes.
The research that included students Albert Liao and Yang Zhao is reported in the journal Physical Review Letters.
Statins associated with lower death risk
TEL AVIV, Israel, Feb. 10 (UPI) -- An Israeli study suggests patients with high cholesterol levels who continually take statins have a lower risk of death over four to five years.
Researchers at Maccabi Healthcare Services and the Sackler Faculty of Medicine in Tel Aviv, Israel, said the lower death risk was seen regardless of whether the patients already had diagnosed heart disease.
In the study, Dr. Varda Shalev and colleagues analyzed data from 229,918 adults enrolled in a health maintenance organization who began taking statins between 1998 and 2006.The researchers said they found continuity of taking statins conferred at least a 45 percent reduction in the risk of death as compared with patients who took statins less than 10 percent of the time.
"In conclusion, this study showed that the continuation of statin treatment provided an ongoing reduction in all-cause mortality for up to 9.5 years among patients with and without a history of coronary heart disease," the scientists said. "The observed benefits from statins were greater than expected from randomized clinical trials, emphasizing the importance of promoting statin therapy and increasing its continuation over time for both primary and secondary prevention."
The findings are reported in the Archives of Internal Medicine.
